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Tapedrive won the grand prize at its latest Colosseum Hackathon, a popular hackathon and venture accelerator launched by organizers of the original Solana Labs Hackathon.
One organizer told me that the contest I tend to see as a partial litmus test for what Solana Builders are currently interested in had a large number of Stablecoin entries. However, the winner of the Grand Prize stabbed Solana’s internal problem: the cost of storing the data.
Solana is the busiest blockchain that exists when things stand. Combined with all this on-chain activity and fast blocking times, it can be expensive to store data in Solana. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and others talk about the issue of reducing data storage on the network.
Tapedrive claims that it can read and write data 1,400 times cheaper than Solana’s current status (i.e. access or chain access or add it to the chain).
This program essentially bundles Solana data and adds cheap encrypted proofs to the blockchain. Minor networks are incentivized to store this data using tape tokens. To earn rewards for these tokens, Tapedrive Miners solves the data storage challenges in parallel every minute to prove they have retained an allocated portion of the data archive. All this relies on Solana’s security proof mechanism.
This sounds like it reminds me of the winner of the first Colosseum Hackathon in the ore.